Appropriate "Safety" Colleges for an MIT Applicant?

KnightMair
Sat, 26 Jan 2008 03:24:16 +0000

Berkeley is a safety school depending on where you are at in California. Top 10% at any decently good high school in the Bay (Lynbrook, Gunn, Mission, Harker, Lowell, etc) are essentially guaranteed to get into Berkeley.

At my high school (one of the above), 50 students a year go to Berkeley out of a class of 500 – most of them engineering or MCB/bio/chem applicants, too. Perhaps 15 crack HYPSMC etc. but that’s beside the point.

Side note: for a student like me with good numbers but not much else, Cal was definitely a safety-- everywhere else I applied to was a reach. I can’t exactly say I had any match schools – it was Berkeley, then the top ten (not saying I applied to all of them)